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Update: we sent out decisions to everyone who applied to the upcoming program, which is now Jan 6-8!
The fact that these decisions were so delayed and communication was poor and the program got postponed is all my fault and I would like to apologize. I understand that my being unresponsive created costs for you and makes planning harder. It also eats into a valuable resource of trust that makes people more suspicious of other events and generally makes coordination difficult.
This happened because I didn't set firm enough deadlines or loop my collaborators in enough on the project, and then once I fell a little bit behind because we got more applications than I expected, I grew very averse to evaluating them. That's not to say this was excusable -- this is the kind of mistake that should cause people to trust me less. This is a fairly unprecedented error for me and I wrote down some reflections on why this happened, which I've shared with everyone who applied. I don't think I'll make another mistake of this flavor any time soon.
One thing I'd like to emphasize is this was entirely my mistake -- Jonas and the rest of the people working on the Lurkshop and at Atlas and LessWrong tried to help but I didn't communicate with them well or keep them in the loop.
Again, thank you everyone for your patience and I'm sorry for the hassle I've caused.
I'm excited to see some of you in person soon!
Everyone who applied to the upcoming program should have heard back now! (Decisions were sent out shortly after you posted your comment.) People who said they couldn't make the upcoming program but wanted to be considered for future programs we might run haven't been notified, since we don't know what those events will look like yet or if they'll happen.
Sure, if people prefer getting money up front I'm happy to do that.
Thanks Eric! I'll be sure to reach out if/when I run something like this in the future! I hope you recover well.
- Lodging is on-site. It's at a renovated former sorority house. Everyone should get their own bedroom, and if getting a private bathroom is a crux for doing we can make sure you get that too, though by default bathrooms will be shared.
- You'd submit a reimbursement request for expenses. If that poses a challenge, we can work something else out. I expect the only significant expense you'd need reimbursement for to be travel -- we'll provide food and lodging.
- I expect 20 people, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be significantly more or fewer. In general, it will be small.
Here's the tentative schedule! (Also added to the post).
We're pretty unsure what the quality of the applications will be. My 85% CI is that we accept 5-50% of people who just read this post and apply.
Another point related to the above: if I had content I wanted LessWrong readers to know that was easy to transmit in written form, I'd just post it on LessWrong. I'm trying to make the most of the opportunity have interactions that can't easily happen over the forum (and I think there's a lot of important interactions of that class!).
Hiya! I'm the co-organizer Jonas mentioned.
This is partially an un-conference style event. The point is not that we the staff have something we want to present to the participants; the point is if we get these people together, we think something worthwhile will happen. (My personal prediction is that at least two participants’ lives will majorly shift because of this program.)
Most of the most valuable events I’ve been to had excellent people and ~no scheduled content. For the most valuable events I’ve been to with content, the content wasn’t the thing that provided the majority of the value for me or most other attendees.
I’ve run ~9 other large workshop-type events and many smaller events, and all of them had a lot of content, but the content mostly functioned to set a context for good conversations. I suspect for the demographic of LessWrong readers, having lots of classes won’t be as useful for context-setting, since there’s already a large body of interesting topics that are common knowledge that people can discuss.
All that said, if I have time, I'll share a default/baseline schedule later tonight.